Startups Fundraising Thursdays - A Forum to Ask About Fundraising, Investors, Accelerators, and Other Sources of Capital

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• Fundraising Thursdays - A Forum to Ask About Fundraising, Investors, Accelerators, and Other Sources of Capital
• early stage startup questions
• Customer Discovery During Pandemic
• I'm having a real hard time choosing pricing model for my B2C app I'm launching soon
• As a non-technical co-founder, how did your company come to understand that your presence was a must-have?
• looking for mentors... on behalf of an early stage startup founder
• Pricing a product based on "number of items"
• Growing an app within an ecosystem (think Shopify, Slack, Zendesk etc.)
• Is it good to give company equity to IT company?
• Marketing as a core competency (and how we've been struggling with marketers)
• How to hire experts for a founding team?

Fundraising Thursdays - A Forum to Ask About Fundraising, Investors, Accelerators, and Other Sources of Capital Posted: 31 Dec 2020 05:05 AM PST Welcome to this week's Fundraising Thursdays Thread. Ask about anything related to fundraising, investors, accelerators, grants, and other sources of capital. That includes how to find these sources, how to work with them, and how to negotiate with them. Don't be shy. The purpose of this is to learn and share ideas and methodologies with one another. Any question is a good question! If you are answering questions, remember to be kind and supportive. Many are just starting out and have no idea what they are doing. That's okay! We all knew nothing before we knew something. You can also find more support using instant chat on the /r/startups discord. submitted by /u/AutoModerator [link] [comments]

early stage startup questions Posted: 31 Dec 2020 03:32 PM PST Hello, I'm looking to raise a F&F round of $50k. I have 4 people in at $10k, $15k, $5k & $5k respectively so far. But I just found out something: You have to have $1M net worth or an annual salary of $200k for the past 2 years to be accredited. Non-accredited investors may invest - but only up to $2k. Is this still the case? Only one of the people that are in would be considered "accredited". Does this mean that the other 3 people can only put in 2k? Also, I am looking for a co founder. I am a technical founder and have built the entire mobile application and am running beta at the moment. We are a few weeks out from launching on the App Store. Where is the best place to find a co founder? Thanks submitted by /u/089-083 [link] [comments]

Customer Discovery During Pandemic Posted: 31 Dec 2020 10:00 PM PST May seem like an obvious question but how are you approaching individuals outside of your network to get feedback while developing your product and building out your company? I'm an early-stage startup and want to solidify my product-market fit before I waste resources developing an MVP. (Just a little background I'm a B2C hardware company.) Many online forums are anti-solicitation and quick to shut down that sort of dialogue. Are there any particular methods you all have adopted in the past few months that's allowed you to get some insight into your market if you didn't already have an existing database of customers to solicit? Discord? Has Reddit worked for you? Facebook? Also aside from customer discovery and market research are there any methods anyone would recommend to get product-market fit? submitted by /u/Ashamed_Worker8444 [link] [comments]

I'm having a real hard time choosing pricing model for my B2C app I'm launching soon Posted: 31 Dec 2020 04:40 PM PST Self funded solo founder here. Launching my MVP soon. It's a niche B2C productivity app with a twist. Subscription based. I'm completely stuck on what pricing model to use. I don't have any direct competitors that do exactly what my app does, so I can't really compare pricing models. There are many variations I've considered: Free tier + Paid tier Only free tier but having ads Only paid tier but with 14 days free trial Only paid tier but with 30 day money back guarantee Does anyone know how I should go about tackling this problem? I've not yet found good resources online about pricing models within the B2C space. There are a lot of resources talking about the actual pricing but not pricing models Any insight is appreciated! submitted by /u/drum_playing_twig [link] [comments]

As a non-technical co-founder, how did your company come to understand that your presence was a must-have? Posted: 31 Dec 2020 06:50 PM PST As a non-technical co-founder, how did your company come to understand that your presence was a must-have? The traditional steorotype was that startups are created by people who have the technical knowledge, now I'm not denying that it is, in a lot of cases it is started by people who know how to develop the product itself, but in other cases it has a marketing side of person. submitted by /u/Bat_Programmatically [link] [comments]

looking for mentors... on behalf of an early stage startup founder Posted: 31 Dec 2020 09:51 PM PST I posted a simple question to r/startups for the first time earlier today, and WOW! The feedback, comments, encouragement, and advice I received from that post are amazing!! I had no idea what an incredible resource this subreddit is. I'm glad I do now! The goal of this post is to find a few experienced individuals, of all backgrounds, for mentorship. Here is a little bio on me: I just graduated university this December, B.S CS. Had an amazing 6fig SWE job offer in NYC, but turned it down to pursue a startup. This past august, I moved from Nowhere, VA to CA with my best friend. We drove cross country in my shitty coupe with all our stuff and set up shop in SF (got broken into 2nd day here and got my camera stolen lol) I applied to YC's winter batch with just an idea, and got rejected after the interview with Levy and Siebel (no shocker). Took that to the chin, built an enormous project alone since then (I'm technical and built it based on the idea, with iterations after deeper market research) and are now in beta. We have traction, and I am raising my first FF round at the moment. (Holy shit, people are investing in my company at a 1m valuation. Surreal!!!) I'm a hungry 22 year old hustler who can program, orate, strategize, and execute. I moved cross country with no mentors (only one close friend, a YC18 alum who I pester too much lol), knowing nobody in CA at the time, no VC connections, and am a solo founder. Spent Thanksgiving working, Xmas Eve working, Xmas working, and now NYE working. All gas, no breaks! On that subject, my company is building a vertical social network app for the retail finance space. Our end goal is to make trading stocks a multi user experience, vs the single user experience it has been for decades. That's a more than brief into! I would love to connect with ex founders, ex/current VC's (not for investment, but guidance), peers building startups themselves, anyone! It's tough being a solo founder, holding myself accountable, and having to make decisions without any counsel. If I can find even one person who is willing to spend some time guiding a rookie from this post, it will be well worth it!! Thanks in advance, and happy new year :) submitted by /u/089-083 [link] [comments]

Pricing a product based on "number of items" Posted: 31 Dec 2020 08:46 AM PST I'm working on a SaaS product aimed at organizations that are government/nonprofit/public-private partnership organizations. These organizations oversee, or are assigned to, certain areas (towns, cities, counties, states, etc). Specially, this product relates to managing interactions with businesses in their locale (kind of like a zen desk maybe) The typical pricing models I'm aware of Flat rate Usage based (based on usage, typical for API products or hosting) Seats/per-user (pretty common for enterprise software) tiered pricing/Feature gating (like flat rate, but multiple flat rates that include different features) custom pricing during a negotiation process Challenges The market is relatively fixed (they aren't making new states/cities very often), so pricing to capture as much value as possible per customer is important Different customers have drastically different budgets (City of Chicago has a much bigger budget than Nowhere, Nebraska population 300), yet they all probably want the same features... thus feature gating may not make sense I like flat rate pricing, because it's simple and I think these customers would appreciate a simple, no major negotiation, price (they're use to vague/hard to understand pricing) Usage based, in the sense of number of API requests, or amount of data storage, doesn't make a lot of sense to me here and it would make it hard for a customer to gauge the cost of the product Seats/per-user is not a bad option, although there is no guarantee that an organization overseeing the city of Chicago will need significantly more seats than a medium size city. You also run into people just sharing accounts etc My current thinking Maybe I can price on "the number of items". In this case, the number of "businesses" in their system. This would allow me to give all the customers the same features, not have to worry about managing based on seats, and would let me capture value based on ability to pay (Chicago has 100k businesses and big budget, nowhere Nebraska has 200 businesses and a small budget). Also the number of businesses in the system will probably track with my costs (s3 storage, email sending costs, storage cost, server bandwidth etc). I see this similar to how workflowy prices by number of nodes or how basecamp and other (at least used to) on projects. The above could also still be coupled with seats and feature gating I suppose. I know this is a vague post and probably doesn't have all the details you need to provide a definitive answer-- but does my general line of thinking seem sound? PS not meaning to hate on Nebraska lol submitted by /u/foundry41 [link] [comments]

Growing an app within an ecosystem (think Shopify, Slack, Zendesk etc.) Posted: 31 Dec 2020 06:56 AM PST Hi there! My team and I are building a Slack application and was wondering if anyone hear has had experiencing building a B2B SaaS tool within another company's app directory/ecosystem. Currently, we're running a freemium model. I was wondering if anyone would be willing to share tips and tricks. If you were to start from the beginning, what would you do differently? Thank you! - Aaron submitted by /u/abf15 [link] [comments]

Is it good to give company equity to IT company? Posted: 31 Dec 2020 09:28 AM PST we have done planning and market research on our ideas. But we couldnt find IT professional as a co founder. So we thought of partnering with IT company. How much of equity should we give to IT company(we are team of 2 members). Would you suggest to partner with IT company or not? submitted by /u/arjunnbhujel [link] [comments]

Marketing as a core competency (and how we've been struggling with marketers) Posted: 31 Dec 2020 10:10 AM PST submitted by /u/diegows [link] [comments]

How to hire experts for a founding team? Posted: 30 Dec 2020 06:34 PM PST I am looking to build my founding team with industry experts. My company is in retail, so the expertise I need is in e-commerce, supply chain management etc. How do I reach out to people that I want to potentially work with on LinkedIn etc.? And obviously, I won't be able to match their current salary so would I compensate for it with equity? For example, if I want to ask VP of supply chain operations at IKEA (hypothetically) to join my team. submitted by /u/maneeshaw [link] [comments]

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